The State Medical Expert Committee in Meghalaya on Tuesday declared one COVID19 case as “false positive”, the first-ever such case detected in the state in the fight against the pandemic.
This was announced by the director of health services (MI), Dr Aman War, after a meeting of the State Medical Expert Committee on COVID19 on Tuesday evening.
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The patient, a 73-year-old man from Umsamlem village in Ri Bhoi district, was declared positive for COVID19 over a week ago.
War told reporters that it was found that the RT-PCR machine was 99 per cent accurate but one per cent erroneous as far as the test is concerned.
“Tests have been conducted twice after this person was declared positive and the results came out negative both in RT-PCR and antibody tests,” said War.
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“Moreover, after doing the contact tracing of those, who came into contact with this person, their samples were collected for tests. Both the high-risk and low-risk contacts tested negative. We, therefore, came to the conclusion that this particular case is a false COVID19 positive case,” War said.
War informed that after the contact tracing was done, the person had a total of 62 high-risk contacts, mostly from Ri Bhoi district including three from East Khasi Hills, and 79 low-risk contacts, all from Ri Bhoi district.
War said the last test result of the person came out negative on Tuesday and it was found that he was having lower respiratory tract infection.
He said the son-in-law of the person also tested negative.
War further said earlier, declaration of Umsamlem area as a ‘containment zone’ would be withdrawn.
With this development, Meghalaya now has recorded a total of 43 COVID19 positive cases and not 44 as it was declared earlier.
Now, there are 14 active positive cases while 28 patients have recovered.
The deadly disease claimed the life of Meghalaya’s first infected person.
Till Tuesday, out of 14,188 samples sent for tests, 13,649 tests were found negative and the results of 498 tests are awaited.